homeschooling

When I saw this idea, I knew it was the art project for us. Easy, creative, and used only supplies we already had on hand (namely plain paper and colored pencils). While the original used only circles for the concentric shapes, I let the kids use any shape they wanted.

Seahawk used rectangles:

Munchkin used hearts:

And I used circles and Small Fry’s hand:

If you think it’s easy outlining an 8-month-old’s hands, think again, lol. But it wasn’t the hardest thing in the world, either.

The black outlines is one way we deviated from the original post on this art project, but I found ours were too muddy to tell what they were without them. So if you try this with your kids, feel free to leave them off if you want :).

Like this:

For our homeschool science right now, we’re working our way through the major organs in the human body. I found this site that has some pretty good information on each one, as well as games if you can access it from a computer (which I never can, so we just use the information).

I bought a roll of brown shipping paper from the Dollar Tree and traced each kid life-size. The first day, I just did that and had them draw their face in. Starting on Tuesday, we’ve been adding 3 organs a day. As of today, we’ve got the voice box, lungs, heart, liver, stomach, spleen, kidneys, gallbladder, and pancreas done. With each one, they draw in the organ and then I read the information to them. I quiz them as we go to make sure they’re retaining the information – at least a little. I’m sure we’ll have to go over the topic again during their school career, but we’re at least building a foundation here.

Like this:

Inspired by Confessions of a Homeschooler, I’ve been working through the 50 states with my kids. First up, we did Hawaii. We had dinner with my brother and sister-in-law that week, and the kids looked at all of their pictures from the three times they’ve been. The next week was Alaska (I’m going basically west to east with a few variations when needed). There is a couple from our church who live in Alaska about half the year, so we picked their brains on what life is like up there. The thing that stuck with all 4 of us the most? The fact that there are virtually no roads; you have to fly to get from city to city.

Our third state was the wonderful state of Washington. We started the week, as we always do, by having the kids trace the outline of the state from our huge wall map. We don’t have a wall big enough to display it (there are 2 that would work in the school room except for the fact that one has the windows and the other was painted to be a chalkboard wall by the previous tenants – and I’m not complaining! That wall is pretty awesome!), so we keep it rolled up and bring it out once a week for this activity. Once the state is pencilled, the kids go over their lines in ink and then bring it to me, where I write in the basic facts that I want to teach them within the outline of the state. They’re basically the same from state to state (except for Hawaii, because that was our first one and I didn’t really have a plan yet when we did it): Nickname (The Evergreen State), Motto (Alki), Capital (Olympia), Largest City (Seattle), Area (71,300 sq mi), Population (6,897,012), Highest Point (Mount Rainier), Lowest Point (The Pacific Ocean), and its Admission to the Union (November 11, 1889). Additionally, we put in the location of the capital, largest city, and highest point. In Washington’s case, we also included Mount Saint Helens.

Here’s Seahawk’s map:

And Munchkin’s:

I still owe them a baking soda and vinegar volcano to represent Mount Saint Helens. That’ll happen probably next week :).

We also worked on our “Fifty Nifty United States” song. Only three states in and they can already sing the whole thing start to finish! Since they mastered that so quickly, we’re going to work on the Presidents song that Confessions recommends starting next week.

I also plan to make a printout of the “Lower 48” and laminate it for each kid, cut the states apart, and attach magnetic tape to the back of each one to have them use as a geography puzzle. I haven’t been able to make it to Staples yet to get that done, though…